Fanuc Shares Suffer Biggest Single-Day Drop in 40 Years
Taylor Wilson
Fanuc plunged 19% intraday Monday — its steepest fall since 1986 — after raising its full-year profit forecast by just 3%, far short of the 23% analysts expected, even as orders surged 37%.
What exactly happened?
Fanuc lifted its full-year operating-profit forecast roughly 3% to ¥218 billion (about $1.4 billion), implying 19% year-on-year growth.
Analysts had expected 23% growth — a gap of about four percentage points. This means → the "good news" wasn't good enough, and the market treated it as a negative.
Shares dropped 19% intraday; the stock is now down about 3% year-to-date.
Orders are booming — why can't profits keep up?
Second-quarter orders (through June) jumped 37% year-on-year — a strong demand signal.
But Fanuc said it has been struggling to source raw materials and components, squeezed by rising costs for semiconductors, other electronics parts, and shipping.
In plain terms = the more orders Fanuc books, the harder its cost base bites; revenue is flowing in, but margins are being eaten along the way.
What does Citi say?
Graeme McDonald, head of Citi's pan-Asia capital-goods team, wrote that "procurement issues are a major headache" for the company.
He called the operating-profit guidance conservative. This means → the problem may not be demand — it may be that supply-chain costs have yet to be absorbed.
Fanuc itself is actively cutting costs, but near-term supply-chain pressure remains a hard constraint.
Can the AI push change the picture?
Last month Fanuc announced a partnership with Nvidia, Fujitsu, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Yaskawa Electric to deploy AI across factories, retail, logistics, and healthcare.
This reflects a broader industrial push to turn AI's language capabilities into physical-world execution — and robots are the most direct vehicle.
But the market's verdict is clear: a long-term narrative does not offset near-term cost pressure. The gap between order momentum and profit delivery is the key test of whether Fanuc's fundamentals can recover.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.